How are sidechains trustless?

How are sidechains not just another form of custody?

Not your keys, not your coins. Period. TINA.

Running Liquid.

How 'bout dem fees, eh?📉

Debating if I should consolidate my kids' UTXOs tonight or wait a few more days. 🤔

Perplexity.ai has pretty much completed replaced my use of Google search.

Coinjoiners looking at the mempool fees:

It's weird to see some folks acting like LLMs are the path to actual artificial intelligence.

Call me when an LLM can make deductions and have original thoughts without being fed the entirety of the Internet first. That's not how actually intelligent humans work. Of course compressing the entirety of human knowledge into a fuzzy completion machine will make it sound intelligent. You're basically making a lossy encoded compressed version of things actually intelligent people have said, with a modicum of ability to generalize by simple association and statistics.

The Turing test breaks down when you throw enough Big Data at it. Congratulations, you've beat the test. You haven't created real intelligence though, you used big data to build a parrot with a huge vocabulary.

Fedimints are racist. The arguments and references to them for use in the developing world often assume an exotic behavior about these societies that is unsubstantiated. Yes...Fedimints and chaumian mints, as described by countless poverty porn pushers in the bitcoin space, are a type of colonialism. It's the digital equivalent of bringing democracy and womens rights to Afghanistan by America. The reality on the ground does not match the fiction in your head, and it kills more of the women than are saved.

The on the ground reality is 7 of 7 influential community leaders are just as likely to steal from the local people and get away with it through various means and social mechanism, as have "consequences" applied to them. All the quixotic arguments for pushing fuckmints and ecrap on the developing world, i have seen, come from people aware of the economic principals and game theory of Bitcoin, but who also simultaneously make the "other" an exception to them.

"Those other people over there" use money differently. "Those noble savages are closer to the land, more communal, more holistic" implies the wording. The reality is grannies and children hoarding small amounts by wrapping it in their clothing , or sewing it in beds, burrying it in the ground, anything they can do to keep it AWAY from others. You know... like bitcoin was once trying to do.

A type of ignorant colonialism, Fedimints and ecash, as presented don't even work in the developed world, yet will work for the "underdeveloped" for some reason, a reason always alluded to in unfounded social science based on some unique and exotic charachteristic of those societies.

The real life behavior, hoarding and limited sharing of physical CASH by community leaders assumes qualities of Bitcoin that are no longer even popularly sought. Privacy, fungibility, low transaction cost.

Families, tribes, groups, hoard cash FROM eachother and share limited amounts for specific reasons. This behavior can be replicated with Bitcoin using simple wallets, truer digital stand-ins than complicated multisigs and over engineered collateralized trust networks or custodial "banks", Lightning.

The developed world and its voice, having the majority of Bitcoin, now want to, in the style classic sociopathic narcisism, push a watered down and hyper controlled Bitcoin on the poor, while also passing it off as "Freedom" money.

These contradictions will not resolve in their favor.

Thanks, but the part I was confused about was why exchange > liquid > cold storage..

Why not just exchange > cold storage? Then realized probably to have the privacy step of L-BTC in the middle, is that the reason (assuming as you say folks don’t use an exchange with liquid)?

There are 60 million millionaires in the world, and every single one of them has a store of value problem. And so does everyone else in the world.

The cost to ship a sizable amount of gold internationally costs hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Even if you just buy hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gold domestically and bring it home, you're paying a spot markup of thousands of dollars. The cost to close a luxury mansion real estate deal (which many wealthy people just own and leave empty as a store of value) can be hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, and then depending on their jurisdiction they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in property taxes on it. An international wire transfer often costs like $30 and takes days and is entirely permissioned/centralized/credit-based. Credit card fees are like 3%. The global banking industry generates hundreds of billions of dollars in fees per year even though it's all centralized.

Bitcoin is a decentralized global liquid store of value and settlement network. You can send money to any internet-connected person in the world generally in an hour or less depending on desired block confirmations. You can indefinitely self-custodially store value in a unit that is scarcer than gold and scarcer than real estate and that unlike both gold and real estate is globally portable. It currently costs like $35 to do this and everyone is losing their minds at how expensive that seems. But $35 is an *outstanding* price for this service, and in ten years I have no idea what the price will be but there are many scenarios where it could be way higher.

Right now, bitcoin fees are higher than normal because people are trading frogs on the timechain and so forth. But regardless, people need to be ready for the prospect of sustained high fees if bitcoin adoption continues to grow structurally with limited block space. This means users, developers, businesses, etc. To put it into this bigger context, fees are still insanely cheap compared to other alternatives listed above that give similar store of value and global payment properties at scale.

I'm a bit surprised fees haven't *already* been $35 on a regular basis by now. So to flip it around; fees aren't expensive because there are frogs on the timechain; fees are still cheap because relatively few people are using bitcoin to send and store money compared to the total addressable market that could be doing so.

Does this price out small users? Unfortunately, yes. That's where layers come in, and the options vary depending on if someone is a power user or not. Hal Finney wrote about that in 2010; it's not a new narrative.

A couple Lightning channels can open a lot of payment liquidity for you. Sidechains like Liquid didn't get much attention when fees were low but now people are giving them a second look. Chaumian mints allow communities around the world to set up their own community banks/custodians with built-in privacy. Places like Cash App allow people to buy bitcoin with decent custodial assurances run by serious people (eg it's not some crazy-haired idiot in the Bahamas). These are all tools that people can use to have bitcoin price exposure, pay in bitcoin, etc. And a unique aspect of bitcoin is the ability to split control. Multi-institution multi-sigs, or federated sidechains: the fact that ownership can be broken into several different entities is not something available to gold or similar assets, and yet a lot of people take it for granted on bitcoin. These are all tools that businesses can offer and people can use for smaller amounts, and then pull into on-chain self-custody if they have a sizable balance for longer-term storage.

In the future, some soft forks or non-form upgrades might allow other types of models. I think the ecosystem is still in its infancy. But in the meantime, it helps to have perspective on what bitcoin offers compared to alternatives, and to be realistic about the long-run inevitability of substantial base-layer fees if any meaningful adoption becomes sustained, and thus the importance of preparing for them.

There are 60 million millionaires in the world, and every single one of them has a store of value problem. And so does everyone else in the world.

The cost to ship a sizable amount of gold internationally costs hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Even if you just buy hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gold domestically and bring it home, you're paying a spot markup of thousands of dollars. The cost to close a luxury mansion real estate deal (which many wealthy people just own and leave empty as a store of value) can be hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, and then depending on their jurisdiction they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in property taxes on it. An international wire transfer often costs like $30 and takes days and is entirely permissioned/centralized/credit-based. Credit card fees are like 3%. The global banking industry generates hundreds of billions of dollars in fees per year even though it's all centralized.

Bitcoin is a decentralized global liquid store of value and settlement network. You can send money to any internet-connected person in the world generally in an hour or less depending on desired block confirmations. You can indefinitely self-custodially store value in a unit that is scarcer than gold and scarcer than real estate and that unlike both gold and real estate is globally portable. It currently costs like $35 to do this and everyone is losing their minds at how expensive that seems. But $35 is an *outstanding* price for this service, and in ten years I have no idea what the price will be but there are many scenarios where it could be way higher.

Right now, bitcoin fees are higher than normal because people are trading frogs on the timechain and so forth. But regardless, people need to be ready for the prospect of sustained high fees if bitcoin adoption continues to grow structurally with limited block space. This means users, developers, businesses, etc. To put it into this bigger context, fees are still insanely cheap compared to other alternatives listed above that give similar store of value and global payment properties at scale.

I'm a bit surprised fees haven't *already* been $35 on a regular basis by now. So to flip it around; fees aren't expensive because there are frogs on the timechain; fees are still cheap because relatively few people are using bitcoin to send and store money compared to the total addressable market that could be doing so.

Does this price out small users? Unfortunately, yes. That's where layers come in, and the options vary depending on if someone is a power user or not. Hal Finney wrote about that in 2010; it's not a new narrative.

A couple Lightning channels can open a lot of payment liquidity for you. Sidechains like Liquid didn't get much attention when fees were low but now people are giving them a second look. Chaumian mints allow communities around the world to set up their own community banks/custodians with built-in privacy. Places like Cash App allow people to buy bitcoin with decent custodial assurances run by serious people (eg it's not some crazy-haired idiot in the Bahamas). These are all tools that people can use to have bitcoin price exposure, pay in bitcoin, etc. And a unique aspect of bitcoin is the ability to split control. Multi-institution multi-sigs, or federated sidechains: the fact that ownership can be broken into several different entities is not something available to gold or similar assets, and yet a lot of people take it for granted on bitcoin. These are all tools that businesses can offer and people can use for smaller amounts, and then pull into on-chain self-custody if they have a sizable balance for longer-term storage.

In the future, some soft forks or non-form upgrades might allow other types of models. I think the ecosystem is still in its infancy. But in the meantime, it helps to have perspective on what bitcoin offers compared to alternatives, and to be realistic about the long-run inevitability of substantial base-layer fees if any meaningful adoption becomes sustained, and thus the importance of preparing for them.